A Shadow-Based Data Fusion Method for Side-Scan Sonar and Multibeam Bathymetry Sonar

Side-scan sonar and multibeam bathymetry sonar are essential tools for ocean exploration, which have the ability to acquire geological and topographic information respectively. Therefore, fusing data from both systems is a highly significant research topic. Due to the occlusion of the underwater terrain, both sonar systems have same detection blind areas, which manifest as shadows. Based on this characteristic, this paper proposes a shadow-based data fusion method. To extract the detection blind areas in multibeam bathymetry sonar, this paper proposes a point cloud denoising algorithm adapted to it. By matching the shadows of the two kinds of data, the actual propagation distance of each side-scan sonar data is calculated. Finally, data fusion is achieved through a terrain-scanning approach. Experimental analysis verifies the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed method.